Laurel Graham
Laurel Graham
Associate Professor
Contact
Office: CPR 227
Phone: 813/974-2634
Email:
Links
Personal Bio
Don't live to work. Work to live.
This old expression reminds us how important it is not to allow life to revolve around ones employment, how crucial it is to cultivate a personal life outside of work and keep that as the focus. For individuals running in place on a work-and-spend treadmill, dreaming of a time when they will no longer have to work so hard, this advice favors cutting back on the task of earning money in order to carve out more leisure time. In a society where most jobs seem to be alienating and dull, it is the prospect of spending money and enjoying oneself on the weekend that keeps people going. These days, people seem to establish their identity more through what the buy than through what job they happen to hold. “Everybody’s working for the weekend,” sang that forgettable Canadian band from the 80’s. But when I listen to my students and people I encounter in public spaces, that is exactly the refrain I hear.
In the seven years since I began teaching on the topic of “Consumer Culture,” I have become increasingly intrigued by the relationship between overwork and overspending. Americans now work considerably more per month than they did just 20 years ago, and credit card debt and personal bankruptcy rates have increased sharply. Despite the steep increase in spending, self-reported levels of happiness have not improved since the 1950’s. Citizens of wealthy countries like the United States over-consume at levels that endanger the planet, while large sections of the world's population continues to struggle for adequate food and clean water. All of this makes me wonder why Americans don’t recognize the futility of consumerism. Groups and institutions wishing to manage our economic behavior have spent billions of dollars trying to convince us that our deepest needs for companionship, creativity, and satisfaction can be met by ever increasing consumption. Activists called “culture jammers” or “adbusters” destabilize the taken-for-granted allure of consumerism in dramatic ways, but a sociologist’s main responsibility is to understand how this “work and spend” logic has been socially constructed and whose interests it serves.
In the 1990s, I focused on the “work” side of the equation. Studying the evolution of modern management and writing a book about Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878-1972), one of the original scientific management consultants, gave me insight into how social science has been exploited to align workers’ behavior to fit the needs of private businesses. Using industrial psychology, Gilbreth showed homemakers and department stores how to get women to “want” to work very efficiently and productively. Maybe a similar orchestration of human desires is what powers the work-and-spend treadmill? As my interests have shifted to the study of consumer culture, I continue to be fascinated with the question of how our society creates masses of individuals who readily trade leisure time for increased spending money. My current focus is on mothers of young children, primarily due to the fact that it is my activity as a mother that is most successfully managed by external forces such as Evenflo, Gerber, pediatricians, and the parenting advice literature. I can trim down my own needs to a frugal minimum, but when it comes to the spending I do on behalf of my young son, I am eager for the recommendations of a whole host of “experts.” A range of industries now constructs the consumption “needs” of young children, who in turn depend upon their parents to sort truth from fiction. This responsibility causes anxiety for parents as they recognize the grave errors they could make by buying an unsafe car seat or allowing toddlers to play with unsafe toys, for example. It is partly this sort of anxiety that moves parents to spend tremendous amounts of money to “get the best product out there, just to be on the safe side.”
My own experience with this type of anxiety has inspired my current research. I am fortunate that, unlike most of the alienated workforce, I get to make this part of my life into a key part of my “work.” Maybe that is why, when I hear the expression “Don’t live to work; work to live” I sometimes have difficulty applying it to myself. My curiosity about how consumers are managed follows me home from work and occupies my mind when I am supposed to be relaxing. This perpetual homework may be my own version of the treadmill, but it makes both my life and my work more interesting.
My research intersects with the interests of several emerging initiatives and established programs on the USF campus such as the Center for Urban Studies, the USF Collaborative on Families and Children, the Lawton Chile's Center for Healthy Mothers and Babies, and the new program in Environmental Science and Policy. Many of the students I teach come from majors in Sociology, Communication, Women's Studies, Religious Studies, American Studies, and Interdisciplinary Social Science. I try to nurture these interdisciplinary relationships with other departments and centers around campus. Just as I can learn much from these collaborations, so can other disciplines benefit from greater exposure to sociology’s specialized knowledge of the interplay between identity and community.
Education
Ph.D.,University of Illinois - Urbana, 1992
Current Courses
| Ref | Course | Sec | Course Title | CR | Day | Time | Location |
| 84444 | SYA 3110 | 001 | Classical Theory
| 3 | MWF | 9:40am-10:30am | CWY 109 |
| 87745 | SYP 4420 | 001 | Consumer Culture
| 3 | MWF | 11:50am-12:40pm | CPR 345 |